The emerging Italian affix -iota between blending and derivation: A corpus-based analysis

This article investigates the emerging affix -iota in Italian, whose development is related to the morphological reanalysis of the word italiota as a blend of italiano 'Italian' and idiota 'idiot'. Based on data extracted from a web corpus, the analysis addresses the morphological properties of blends containing the adjective -(id)iota and the usage contexts of italiota, focusing on the semantic fields of its collocates. We found that blends with both -(i)diota and -iota are productive and that -iota displays affix-like properties and a derogatory meaning, especially in political discourse. This study confirms that the parts of blends belonging to extra-grammatical morphology (Dressler 2000; Mattiello 2018) can undergo a change that leads them to acquire affix-like properties and get closer to more regular morphology.